Teachers' Classroom Strategies - Deborah Tannen

Any response to Tannen’s article cannot be complete without some idea of Tannen’s purpose in writing the article. As it is, the article is activist in nature, rather than militant. Tannen does not so much seek to stridently prove a thesis than to raise awareness of how current teaching methods disadvantage women, as well as to suggest an alternative model. This is not to say that argumentation does not exist in Tannen’s writing, but that it is far more subtle, often implied. Part of this indirect approach is present in her writing style. The article is informal, even deeply personal, written almost like a first-person narrative. Her use of a case study from her personal experience (anecdotal), her relating of her conversations on the topic with her colleagues makes the article highly accessible, and easy to read. Given the (often) highly personal nature of teaching methods to teachers, Tannen’s friendly prose serves a second purpose in slipping past the automatic defensive instinct in a way that an aloof and critical scholarly essay would not. Criticism of the status quo in education is implied, not explicit, and coupled with her personal anecdotes, allows her to take the position of a fellow educator as well as a scholar, allowing readers (educators, presumably) to relate much better to her article.

On those grounds then, I must necessarily conclude that Tannen’s conscious choice of writing style has been rather astute, given her intended purpose. However, some other choices, I feel, are a little more dubious. As part of this decision to write in an informal manner, Tannen references research only lightly. While she mentions the work of sociologists and anthropologists (Lever, Goodwin, and Eder), their findings are summarised, in order to form the foundation of evidence her fundamental essentialist premise depends on. Their research only supports her arguments (minimally), in an attempt to add academic rigour to the article as well as to clearly frame it in view of the larger academic discourse on gender and (mis)communication. Personally, this strategy seems vaguely discordant to me, if only because Tannen’s case study (and the basis on which she formulates her analysis on the flaws of the current education system, with regard to females), deals primarily with her graduate class. Lever, Goodwin, and Eder, on the other hand, have been cited as dealing primarily with communication in children. While it may be considered fair to extrapolate research done on children to include behaviour in adults, to me, this is still too big a leap of logic, and an assumption better avoided, since it is this research which grants Tannen’s article a veneer of academic depth. Consequently, it is all the more essential for research to be appropriately used.

I also find Tannen’s premise that the conversational styles (and thus effective learning styles) of men and women differ, faces a problem of multi-causality. Given, as mentioned above, that she only uses one appropriate case study, while it clearly fleshes out the concepts she presents, it cannot sufficiently prove that gender is the major influencing cause behind the different reactions each student had towards her teaching style. Issues of ethnicity and culture are barely deflected by an example of similar cultural rituals worldwide, which attempts to suggest that the common factor must be gender instead of ethnicity. However, because the sample size is so small (there are about twenty students, she mentions, in her graduate class), trends generalised from the class tend to skew perceptions. While the three Asian men should not normally be significant, their number takes on significance because of the small size of the group, although they could be outliers. To add to the confusion, she notes differing social contexts causes the learning behaviour of her students to change. Given this observation, I suggest that perhaps using her graduate class as a case study was not even appropriate in the first place. If we are to accept her arguments at face value, then we necessarily run into a slight discrepancy. If social context alters behaviour, then spending years in a male-oriented education system, and various cultural contexts should necessarily alter and train various types of behaviour into her students, the results of which comprise her findings. While tabula rasa is impossible to ask for in the social sciences, it may even be more to her benefit to study the behaviour of younger children.

The most ironic, perhaps, is that Tannen’s article reflects what seems to be a more feminine style (as mentioned in her own article.) She skillfully indicates weaknesses in the current state of the education system, and sugests personal anecdotes to illustrate what she means, and offers an alternate model. By sacrificing depth for a more welcoming style, she limits her role in the academic discourse on gender and communication. However, while this renders her article less academically rigorous and less incisive, given her purpose is to raise awareness of the different education needs of women, and to incite questioning of the education status quo, the trade-off between palatibility and incisive analysis seems well worth it.

ETA: Thanks, Kel, for the concrit! :D

"Can't We Talk?" - Deborah Tannen

By understanding the reason for miscommunication (along gender lines), we can, presumably, avoid such problems in future. This is the entire premise the extract from Tannen is based on. The reasons for miscommunication, she suggests, emerge primarily from the differences in attitudes that men and women have towards communication; to men, communication is a vehicle through which they express their dominance in a social hierarchy, or to gain information, while women regard communication as a medium for more personal and emotional interaction. While the meaning of words remains unchanged, the context in which a man and a woman frame their interaction differs, causing them to react differently.

As it is, the article does not so much attempt to analyse communication between genders with academic rigour, than to study and explain occurrences of miscommunication, and empower the reader with a greater understanding of the topic. Consequently, Tannen’s article is full of humourous anecdotes that illustrate the various ways in which men and woman think and react differently. These anecdotes emotionally engage the target audience (the casual reader who wishes to understand and avoid gender-based miscommunication), allowing the reader to empathise with the characters in the situations given, and hence, to relate the situation to his or her own life. This enables the reader to apply to lessons learned from each anecdote. These different episodes are funny, and by using sparse detail, they seem all the more commonplace, as general templates which miscommunication roughly follows. This use of humour and simple explanation makes this light reading, which is no doubt best suited for a wide and general audience.

Problematically, I cannot quite find myself agreeing with Tannen, if only because I feel the division of attitudes based on gender seems to be a rather artificial divide, and more specifically, that the specific analysis (to some extent), does cripple an article that attempts to produce a general principle.

The foundational assumption on which the entire article hinges on is this (unspoken) idea that the miscommunication issues are, indeed, attributable to gender. It is obviously unfair to expect Tannen to prove that they are, given this is not the purpose of her article. However, at the most basic level, her analysis is dependent on this claim – a failure to accept the claim results in a difficulty in accepting the main thrust of the article, and the analysis it offers. Her arguments only stand should the reader first accept the claim, and thus the analytical framework it provides. If the reader cannot accept that the miscommunication in each portrayed situation is due to separate gender attitudes, then the anecdotes become examples of miscommunication between different people, which is a separate affair that does not involve gender. Hence, to some extent, it may be important to consider the validity of the assumption that it is gender perspectives which cause misunderstandings.

My inability to accept this assumption makes it problematic for me to therefore accept her given analysis. Rather than attributing miscommunication to problems of gender attitudes when it comes to framing words in a context, and thus interpreting them (for example, how a husband and wife can understand the sentence “Would you like to stop for a coffee?” and yet, at the same time, crucially misframe the sentence as an inquiry, or a subtle request), it seems equally feasible to consider different attitudes as the cause of the misunderstanding. The problem then, is not because the male and the female contextualise statements differently, but that some people tend to be far more direct, while others do not like to be bossy. It is equally conceivable that culture and upbringing has a role to play, where the Asian may be more comfortable with indirect speech, as it is rude to impose, while a person from a more liberal culture may be predisposed towards perceiving such questions exactly as they seem to be.

To some extent, I perceive this as an issue of interpretation, and not quite one of gender. In particular, the essential ability that all decent literature students must posses; the ability to pick up the different subtle nuances that communication often involves. This ability (or inability) seems less gender-based than personality-based (if we do not consider issues of training).

Tannen freely acknowledges there are bound to be exceptions with the caveat that it is impossible to categorise all men and women. This is indeed a hazard of using very specific anecdotes and inductively obtaining a general trend or a general argument from them – which, problematically, is exactly what Tannen does, to some extent, in this article. By analysing the specific examples of particular interactions between particular couples, we are to draw a general principle by which genders interact, and miscommunicate. This process leaves me a little wary, because specific scenarios are not often sufficiently thorough enough as data for general rules to be derived from them. Whether the rules deal with all men and women or most men and women – the gap between the specific and the general is still troubling.

It is, however, questionable if these issues are significant. My issues probably arise from disdain for gender-specific analysis, which I consider to be oversimplistic, and an artificial construct when it comes to understanding personal attitudes. Presumably as well, I probably just don’t work well with readings that can be classified under popular culture, given that my main problems with Tannen seem to be more related to argumentation, which, given her purpose, is undoubtedly rather unfair of me. More essentially, it really doesn’t matter, because given the point of Tannen’s article is about explaining how miscommunication arises and how to avoid such miscommunication, then a reader who even picks up her article should, at least, have partially accepted some idea of miscommunication caused by gender differences.

The problem of specificity still holds, however, although it may not be so important to prove the link between gender and miscommunication. (Granted, it is a tall order, in any case.) Drawing a general lesson from each anecdote to apply in interactions with the opposite gender is still dangerous, if only because it assumes most general interactions follow the same rule. In general, however, Tannen advocates understanding, and tolerance. These two principles, I agree, should definitely stand anyone in good stead.